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• I really loved this book, much more than I thought I would. It is set in the Balkans, and the protagonist Natalia, a young doctor, is coming to terms with the death of her grandfather in the aftermath of the war. He seems to have had a large influence on her life - not only was he a doctor but he took her to see tigers (which he loved) and told her folk stories.The folk stories, and especially the malicious gossip masquerading as myth, mix beautifully with the difficult reality of living through the Balkan conflict. I loved how the ethnic disputes of the region are more alluded to than laboured: the book is far more concerned with the fate of the zoo animals than that of the country as a whole, which gives a feeling of innocent immediacy. There are some big themes here, mainly to do with death and what happens when you die, where again the fantastical grates awkwardly with the mundane duties of the doctors. But mainly this is a satisfying and suspenseful story, well told, with lovely prose and details. A worthy winner of the Orange Prize.

  5.00 out of 5

  Yarrow

• What a storyteller this young author is. I loved every page, every sentence. It doesn't matter at all that I'm not sure what "meaning" to take away from the book, although I will certainly read it again--and soon--to see what gels the second time around.We are given to understand that the action takes place in the former Yugoslavia, sometime "after the war" that separated that country(so, late 20th century?). There are place names a-plenty, and references to "the Marshal", border crossings, checkpoints, but the names that became so familiar in the 20th century--Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, Srebrenica, Milosevic, Tudman--do not appear and the politics of the conflicts are totally absent, so it is almost possible to imagine everything happening just outside the known limits of the real world in a place where what feels fabulous to us can be accepted as normal. A tiger set free from a zoo ruined by bombing may find a soul-mate in a deaf, mute, abused woman. A man may fling himself from a cliff in despair at having lost his true love, only to find that he has broken Death's rules and cannot die. A taxidermist turned bear hunter may become one of the creatures whose pelts he collects. I found the magic of the words erased any fragment of disbelief in the magic of the stories. I am very aware that there are flaws in The Tiger's Wife as a Novel, but I don't care. I was swept away and astonished, and this will be one of my all-time favorite reads.

  5.00 out of 5

  laytonwoman3rd

• This is a wonder of a novel! I requested it from LTER after reading two stories by Téa Obreht in The New Yorker, one of which turns out to have been an excerpt from this book. The stories were remarkable for their beautifully crafted language and sheer storytelling power and raised my expectations for the novel. I could not have been more richly rewarded. Natalia, a young doctor in an unnamed Balkan country still suffering from the effects of a war that has torn the country apart, travels across a new border to vaccinate orphans. Learning that her beloved grandfather, also a doctor, has died far from home, and under pressure from her grandmother to find out the circumstances of his death, she makes a detour to the town where he died. On this frame, Obreht builds layer upon layer of stories, stories told to Natalia through the years by her grandfather, stories that explain everything about his life and, she comes to believe, about his death. The first story takes place during an earlier war, when Natalia's grandfather was a young boy, and a tiger, freed from the city zoo by German bombs, makes his way to her grandfather's village. The second story is about an immortal man who meets Natalia's grandfather three times over many years, appearing where there is illness and war to gather souls.Obreht tells these stories bit by bit, with vivid imagery and fully developed characters, interweaving them seamlessly with Natalia's journey. Ultimately, they help her understand her grandfather's life and death while they illuminate a people's dreams, fears and superstitions. At 25, Téa Obreht writes with self-assurance well beyond her years. This is a dazzling debut..

  5.00 out of 5

  alpin

• Margaret Atwood, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver….you’ve got fresh competition in the world of wonderful writers who are women of fine literature. Tea Obreht deserves every award and booklist ranking in the book business today. The Tiger’s Wife is real literature. Some books just break out of the pack and hit you upside the head. This is one of them. It's thrilling to know Tea Obrecht is still in her 20s and has such tremendous potential for a long literary career.As a storyteller, Tea situates the reader between the grandfather and his telling of stories to the young woman narrator; both medical foot soldiers in eastern Europe. The special relationship between a womanchild and her grandfather offers a way inside the meanings of family stories.The opening page and first fifteen pages now seem a bit of a blur, though obviously well written enough to keep me reading. A blur in that the scene setting and premise seemed if not foreign, unfamiliar and nondescript. Which at this point in the story, begins to make sense that this is her intent as an author.It could be anywhere. It could be your family. But it’s not. It’s sure not Ithaca. Did I mention Tea Obrecht is an Ithaca author? This town has real writing talent. And Ithaca is on a roll in recent years with bestselling fiction and non-fiction authors making our community home.Tea was born in Belgrade and has lived in the U.S. since age 12. The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s have published Tea’swork. The New Yorker named her one of the 20 best American fiction writers under 40 and she was includd on the National Book Foundation list of 5 under 35. Last month she won the Orange Prize for Fiction in the UK as the youngest recipient ever of this award for excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing internationally.This Balkan literary voice provides a narrator, Natalia, a young doctor on a mission of mercy to an orphanage. She is haunted by the death of her grandfather, who told his wife he was on his way to see her. Instead he went to a remote and desolate place where he died alone. She paints a story in the landscape itself.It’s the stories her grandfather tells and her own childhood experiences with him that suddenly propel the reader forward into fantastical past. The reader and narrator share the expedition in finding the meaning behind these events. Chapter by chapter, Tea Obreht pulls the reader deeper and deeper into the plot.

  5.00 out of 5

  SwensonBooks

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